The story
ZED-ZEN started inside hospitality, not inside an agency. Its founder, Alex Mantello, has over 10 years in hospitality and has owned two cafés, where he handled people, stock, suppliers and day-to-day operations himself. The team has 6+ years of hospitality operations across 30+ locations. That is where our way of working comes from: we start from what your business is losing today.
The idea of a “founder’s notebook” comes from the questions anyone building something asks themselves. We put them into five chapters: I have an idea; nobody sees me; they see me, but they don’t buy; I’ve grown and can’t keep up; I want it to run itself. Each chapter has a service: consulting, brand and website, marketing, software, AI and data.
Delivery platform marketing is something we do day to day. Over three years we did delivery marketing for 30 clients in Bucharest on Glovo, Bolt Food, Wolt and Tazz, and ran a workshop together with Glovo. We also launched our own virtual brand, Lunch Dealzz, in 4 Bucharest kitchens, which showed us from the inside how a menu behaves.
When existing tools stopped keeping up, we started building software. Apps for reviews, in-store music, delivery analytics, a B2B shop and social media followed. All of them became modules in HoReCaOS, our operating system for restaurants, with 65 modules you can switch on. The idea is simple: one platform instead of six apps.
We don’t only work in hospitality. We have made brandbooks and websites for a music school, a tourism business and a 4x4 festival, a platform for transport fleets, a public registry of about 3.9 million companies and civic projects such as România Transparentă. Our projects run on our own infrastructure, managed from Bucharest.
How we work
Real numbers only
We only publish results we can show, and we say whose results they were. When a client with 8 restaurants grew from 80,000 to 850,000 lei a month, we say it was one client, not the average.
Our own infrastructure
Projects run on our dedicated Hetzner server, with Coolify hosting 28 apps, self-hosted Supabase with 16 databases and daily backups, and Cloudflare. We know where the data lives and who is responsible for it.
One team, from idea to app
The same team does the consulting, the brand, the website, the marketing, the app and the automation. You don’t lose time explaining the same business to four suppliers, and the brand doesn’t get lost between them.
Built from operations
Our hospitality products start from problems lived inside a restaurant: stock that doesn’t add up, a missing shift, an order that doesn’t come. That is why we first ask how you work today, and only then suggest what to build.
Prices stated up front
We publish indicative prices: branding from 500 RON, websites from 1,500 RON, automations from 800 RON, HoReCaOS from €5 a month. For anything that doesn’t fit a package, you get a concrete quote before we start.